You are already mindful. You already have its capacity within you for emotional resiliency.
This is good to know, especially when feeling anxious, panicky, or just plain yucky from a sense of dis-ease.
Remembering the resiliency of mindfulness can start in a number of ways.
One way is to drop into awareness of the breath.
Try it now.
See if you can bring awareness to the breath. Notice the sensations of the breath breathing for you. Bring awareness to the breath taking care of you, supporting you, sustaining you.
Breathing in, breathing out.
Starting over, letting go.
To be present with the breath is to feel the essence of resiliency; to feel its attention to your needs; its responsiveness to your reactivity; Its gentle persistence; its unconditional kindness; it's non-judgemental support; its availability during the truth of your experience.
The breath reminds you that you have enough.
As the poet David Whyte writes:
"Enough.
These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused again and again
until now.
Until now.
The breath is a gateway to this opening to life. A gateway to resilient possibility.
This insight is rendered beautifully in the words of Jon Kabat Zinn, one of the founding teachers of modern secular mindfulness.
"As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong, no matter how ill or how hopeless you may feel.
Resilience can be found in this reframing perspective - there is more right than wrong with you.
This can be extended further, to:
There is more right than wrong with this moment, there is more right than wrong with this situation, there is more right than wrong with this conversation, there is more right than wrong with this person.
And so it goes.
Each moment more right than wrong.
Each breath a reminder of resilience within.
Each breath full of possibility.
Each breath already mindful.